Sunday, October 04, 2009

I was rather looking forward to PANDORUM, having discovered a love of sci-fi watching MOON, but the movie was rather a disappointment. It's basically a lo-fi reworking of ALIEN but with less water-tight plot machinations and less memorable characters.

As the movie opens, two astronauts wake up from hyper-sleep to relieve the crew on a long space mission. Problem is, they can't contact the bridge or remember anything. Peyton (Dennis Quaid) guides Bower (Ben Foster) through the ship in a fairly spooky opening sequence, but as soon as Bower stumbles upon some other crew-members the suspense is over. The whole zombie-mutant-space-psycho concept has been done better in ALIEN for pure action and in SOLARIS for pure psych-thriller. Even MOON did the deep space paranoia/hallucination thing better.

PANDORUM was released in September in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the US, France, the Philippines, and Switzerland. It opened this week in the UK, Germany, South Korea, Austria, Estonia, Latvia and Taiwan. It opens next week in Sweden and Portugal, and on October 15th in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Russia, and Singapore. It opens on October 22nd in the Netherlands and Mexico and on October 30th in Poland, South Africa, and Turkey. It open s on November 6th in Spain and on November 27th in Finland. It opens on December 4th in Norway and on February 4th in Australia and New Zealand.